November 22, 2024

s19e07: Decide What’s Important; Tacit Admission

0.0 Context Setting

Friday, 22 November 2024 in Portland, Oregon. A cold and wet day, with on-and-off again rain.

I have something like at least three unfinished fragments that I got super excited about but now am not sure how I’ll finish them. It’s irritating.

A quick reminder that my dance card is open, so if you've been meaning to work with me, get in touch!

0.1 Events

Nothing to report at this time.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 Decide What’s Important

Okay, so here’s the deal. Say you’re a social network. Say you’re one that’s really big. Like, really, really big.

I mean, let’s just say it’s Facebook or whatever the EU decides is big enough that day (I am sympathetic to the EU regulating based on vibes, to be honest).

At some point, you’re big enough that the decisions you make about your “algorithm” i.e. deciding what content is displayed are societal-scale. Thumb on the scale [sic] type stuff.

But you didn’t start out that way. Say you started out as a way to text people what you had for brunch, or you started out as way to rate the attractiveness of women on campus.

Are you supposed to make decisions about your content algorithm that are responsibly society-conscious right from the beginning? Or are you supposed to make ones that are going to emphasize and support growth so you have a profitable (or even sustainable) business? How and when do you decide to change them?

I had a thinking-out-loud when Adam “Threads” Mosseri posted that they have a sliding scale of encoding to higher quality videos depending on whether an account drives more views or not:

[the quality of your video] works at an aggregate level, not an individual viewer level. We bias to higher quality (more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views. It’s not a binary theshhold [sic], but rather a sliding scale. ¹

My thinking out loud was this:

There's something really interesting here about the concept of net neutrality and equal access, but for encoding and quality.²

... which I think a bunch of people took to me advocated for a net neutrality approach and principle of fairness when I’m thinking out loud. But I protest too much.

Meta only has a certain pool of CPU available for encoding. They could decide to flat encode at the same rate for everyone uploading.

But they probably want to make more money, so maybe the money funnel gets wider if popular videos are displayed at higher quality?

Maybe the expenses come down a little bit if popular videos are encoded at a higher quality for smaller size?

Is it fair for everyone to have video encoded at the same quality? I mean, that’s the wondering out loud that I’m doing. Should everyone have video encoded at the same quality? What’s the benefit?

What if you could pay for better encoding?

There’s a thing here about Bob Iger at Disney admitting that the reason why they’re pushing up the price of Disney+ is so they can move as many subscribers as possible to the cheaper ad-funded plan because that plan has a higher average revenue per user. The advertising market for SVOD is mature enough now for that sweet ad revenue to start coming in.

In which case, would it be true that Meta would likely make more money by deciding itself where to allocate more compute for better quality encoding (presuming better quality encoding leads to more/better engaging [sic] videos from creators), because that leads to more advertising revenue, than to charge for better quality encoding (which involves maintaining the entire billing and customer support infrastructure too). I mean, you already have ad reps.

So in a roundabout way I get back to “what happens if you try to apply the principle of neutrality from net neutrality to other things” to compute being one of those other things. Is a minimum assured amount of compute important to a society?

1.2 Tacit Admission

A thing I have finally seen on Amazon is when it flags frequently returned items. So when I search for something and (inevitably) get a gazillion different versions of the same thing some of them will be labeled with something like “This item is frequently returned”, which:

1. Is super useful as a consumer, yeah?
2. Is a tacit admission that Amazon is a marketplace that does carry a lot of tat?
3. And that Amazon doesn’t care?

I mean it’s like a giant caveat emptor open market? It’s not like Amazon appears to delist any of the frequently returned items. I have no idea if Amazon downranks frequently returned items. I have no idea if your item is frequently downranked whether you can position that item as a sponsored item in results.

But it definitely feels like Amazon are saying: sure, knock yourself out. We’re still going to make money either way, even after taking the hit of returns processing.

Is this supposed to be a marketing signal? The seller is going to know the return rate anyway, so they’ve already made the calculus that a certain number of returns is totally fine.

And so: what’s Amazon’s definition of “frequently”?

You get the benefit of this newsletter being literally typing-out-loud, so fine, let’s go Google and of course there are sellers wanting to know what the deal is with the Frequently Returned Badge and, for example, wanting a list of the ASIN/SKUs³. And here’s a reddit post about an inaccurate frequently returned badge⁴.

And the top red-teaming reddit post about the announcement from two years ago is: “This will be a new way to sabotage competitors”⁵, which: yeah!

Anyway. I like it, but it also sort of cements Amazon’s position as a “fuck it, we’ll sell anything (legal, I guess, until told otherwise), it’s all on you” retailer.

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My hands are cold. This is not necessarily a room temperature thing.

How are you doing?

Best,

Dan

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